Trigger shock
DERANGED DOC BOUGHT WEAPON UPSTATE: COPS
THE ASSAULT rifle a deranged doctor used to blast his former co-workers at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital had been purchased less than two weeks earlier from an upstate gun store, police sources said Sunday.
The AM-15, carefully concealed under Henry Bello’s white lab coat as he entered the building Friday, was bought from Upstate Guns and Ammo in Schenectady on June 20 — just eight days before the rampage that left one doctor dead and six other people wounded.
The box for the gun was found in Bello’s apartment in the Bronx, sources said.
The owner of the store, Craig Serafini, declined to answer questions at his home in a Schenectady suburb.
“Take a walk,” he said before shutting the door on a Daily News reporter.
Investigators believe Bello, 45, bought the gun himself, sources said.
The gun appeared to have been legally purchased despite Gov. Cuomo’s assault weapons ban, which he signed into law in January 2013 following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
The law instituted a stricter definition of assault weapons not allowed to be sold in the state, including the Bushmaster used in Newtown, Conn.
The gun control law, known as the SAFE Act, was hailed as one of the toughest in the nation.
Yet the law didn’t keep the deadly assault-style rifle out of Bello’s hands — despite his several run-ins with the law.
On April 23, 2003, Bello was arrested for burglary after kicking in his girlfriend’s door and entering her Bronx apartment, a police source said. That case appeared to have been dismissed, a source said.
That year he was also busted for fare-beating, which is a misdemeanor.
On Aug. 28, 2004, he was arrested in the East Village for grabbing a 23-year-old woman by the crotch, telling her, “You’re coming with me,” police sources said.
He pleaded guilty in September of that year to unlawful imprisonment — a misdemeanor — and was sentenced to community service.
He was arrested again in October 2009 for unlawful surveillance under a victim’s clothing, a source said. That case is sealed, indicating the charges were dismissed.
A Cuomo spokeswoman was unable to immediately clarify how the AM-15 avoided the assault rifle ban.
The SAFE Act bans certain rifles through a very technical definition of what constitutes an “assault rifle.”
According to the governor’s SAFE Act website, banned assault rifles are “semiautomatic rifles capable of receiving a detachable magazine” that also have one or more of an array of military characteristics, including a bayonet mount, protruding pistol grip, or a folding or telescopic stock.
Bello had dodged any felony convictions, which would have prevented him from purchasing a firearm in New York.
Late on Sunday it emerged that the city’s background check on Bello before hiring him in September as a home aide for AIDS and HIV patients also didn’t uncover any red flags.
Meanwhile, the six surviving victims of the attack — five hospital staffers and one patient — remain in stable condition but none have been released from the hospital, a spokesman said Sunday.
Two of the victims were transferred to Mount Sinai Hospital for specialized care, and they remain in critical but stable condition, hospital spokesman Errol Schneer said.
The four other victims who survived the rampage are still receiving treatment at BronxLebanon.
“All are downgraded to stable condition,” Schneer said.
None of the victims were expected to be released Sunday, he said.
The doctor slain by Bello, Tracy Sin-Yee Tam, ended up in the cross hairs because she was covering a shift for a colleague.
Tam was actually supposed to be off the day Bello attacked.
Bello’s target, Dr. Kamran Ahmed, was off of work the day of the attack. Ahmed said he had no idea why he was the object of Bello’s hatred.
“The strange thing is he was nice with me,” Ahmed told the Daily News on Saturday.
“I’m shocked. He had a problem with everybody.”
Two hours prior to storming the hospital, Bello ranted in an email to The News that the hospital had unfairly derailed his career in medicine.
Sources have said he was forced to resign in February 2015 after being accused of sexually harassing a worker.
“This hospital terminated my road to a licensure to practice medicine,” Bello wrote to The News at 12:46 p.m. on Friday.
“First, I was told it was because I always kept to myself. Then it was because of an altercation with a nurse.”
Police sources said he shouted at his former colleagues as he exacted revenge.
“Why didn’t you help me out when I was in trouble?” sources said he yelled.
Bello shot himself as police closed in.